


Loveless

by SMJB



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, content warning: mentions of rape & rape culture & racism so on and so forth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22215652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: This is a setting where magic exists, but it’s unlikely it will ever be known to the natives of this world. It has no physical manifestations, and its most obvious--and almostcertainlyunintentional, assuming whatever did this had the ability to have intentions in the first place--effect would only appear to be abnormal to people who, well, didn’t grow up in a world where this is normal. Alas, the people of this world have no access to interdimensional travel (and if anyone who does has ever visited this world, that lies beyond the scope of this story), and so have no way of knowing how weird it is that nowhere on their planet is there a single culture that understands the concept of romantic love.
Relationships: did you not read the title?, literally no pairings whatsoever
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Loveless

This is a setting where magic exists, but it’s unlikely it will ever be known to the natives of this world. It has no physical manifestations, and its most obvious--and almost _certainly_ unintentional, assuming whatever did this had the ability to have intentions in the first place--effect would only appear to be abnormal to people who, well, didn’t grow up in a world where this is normal. Alas, the people of this world have no access to interdimensional travel (and if anyone who does has ever visited this world, that lies beyond the scope of this story), and so have no way of knowing how weird it is that nowhere on their planet is there a single culture that understands the concept of romantic love. 

Allow me to disabuse you of notions that you’re probably already forming, however--this is not a drab, depressing world, or at least no more so than ours is. They’ve been robbed of one emotion, yes, but they have plenty of others--plenty of other forms of _ love _ , even: love of parent for child, love of friends, love of one’s ideology of choice, love of a good book; in spite of its insidious ability to worm its way into every aspect of our media culture, romance is not the be-all-end-all of the human experience, and aromantic is not the same as soulless. These people have lives that are just as culturally rich and joyful as ours are.

It’s unclear when this world deviated from our own--the natives appear to be perfectly normal human beings, and yet it clearly happened long before the dawn of recorded history, for these people don’t even have a concept of marriage (which itself is only loosely related to the notion of romantic love, yet relies on the pair bonds created by it to inspire its initial invention). Whenever it happened, it would have changed everything--the gene flow of humanity going forward would have been radically different, causing different people to be born who make different decisions, changing movements of entire peoples throughout God knows how much of our prehistory--and indeed, none of their language families bear even the slightest relation to ours. No Indo-European, no Afro-Asiatic, no Sino-Tibetan, no Niger-Congo, no Nilo-Saharan or Turkic or Uralic. The would-be ancestors of the progenitors of these languages moved in different ways, and their descendants subscribed to different linguistic fads.

And yet even with instantaneous, global quantum chaos theory butterflies flapping their wings and changing the temporal weather, their history gets pretty close to ours in places.

It’s not surprising that agriculture arose in the same places in this world as it did in our own, or at the same times. City-states still rose between the rivers that would never be known as the Tigris and the Euphrates, and gave way to empires--the fact that one of these empires went on to have their own version of the Greco-Persian wars exactly on schedule is a bit more disturbing, however. This isn’t magic, though, but simply geography; this not-Persian empire simply evolved in the same (exact) environment as our Persian empire, and so had the same (exact) limits as to where it could naturally expand into--and though they actually did manage to win the war in this world (Better organization? Worse on the part of the not-Greeks? Plain dumb luck? Who can say), all it bought them was decades of quagmire before being forced to let them go (and pretty much at the same time that the final Greco-Persian war was scheduled to end in our world, at that) and still had the effect of creating a unified culture in and around the sea that would never be known as the Aegean.

But on the other hand, for all the power that geography has over us, humans still have free will, and differences in culture that have nothing to do with geography can still have a profound impact on history (for instance, bad things were always going to happen when the Europeans reached the Americas and stuck around for good, but the situation may well have been a lot less bad had the people who set the example for how Europeans should interact with the rest of the world were, say, the mercantile Florentines, rather than Spaniards fresh from the xenophobic religious wars that were the Reconquista with all these Conquistadors cooling their heels they didn’t know what else to do with)--and there being no concept of romance, pair bonding, or marriage in any culture on Earth creates some radically different cultures.

For one thing, the way families are organized have to be different. Clans are nearly universal--mothers need support systems to help raise their children, and in a world without husbands this is the most obvious choice, though there are places where children are raised communally by their village--which is the same basic concept as clan rearing, only based on location rather than blood.

Patriarchy still rises, but patrilineal inheritance never can (well, at least until they invent paternity tests, but at that point you’d be going against thousands of years of tradition)--but even in our world there are numerous cultures where nephews inherit from uncles rather than sons from fathers, making this hardly a constraint at all. Without patrilineal inheritance or the concept of marriage, there’s no reason for the madonna/whore complex to develop--and with that goes much of the justification of rape culture, so that’s one metric at least by which this world is objectively better than ours (though men can still be awfully entitled).

Racism as we know it is nearly non-existent in this world’s history, though the reason for this is not always pleasant--simply put, if you enslave a bunch of people and make them work under the watchful eye of your womenfolk, the next generation of your clan is going to look a lot like your slaves. It’s not worth even  _ trying  _ to quantify whether a culture in which men and women alike are allowed to rape slaves without fear of social stigma is superior to one in which only men are, but it does make for one in which genes flow up and down the social hierarchy equally, which in turn means that the windows in which racism can rise are far too short for a solid ideology to form in.

Of course, classes and castes can still exist, but these are much harder to try to justify “scientifically” during this world’s equivalent of the Enlightenment when it’s blatantly obvious that the groups you’re trying to claim are separate are mixing blood by dint of simple proximity, and it’s easier to escape the conditions of your birth when people can’t use the color of your skin as a tell. There will never be a eugenics movement in this world; even if they wanted to, there’s no mechanism they can think of by which you can actually control who people choose to reproduce with.

I say racism was  _ nearly  _ non-existent because there is a situation where you get one-way gene flow. Merchant empires tend to send their men out to crew their ships and govern their port towns and extract resources from the peoples under their thumb while keeping their women at home. There’s a model going back to a people roughly analogous to our Phoenicians where powerful men in the colonies send home for their nephews at a young age, so that they might raise their heirs to understand their inheritance. There’s a great deal of variety in such empires, particularly in where the balance of power lay in such bifurcated families, and there were many empires that were in almost all ways basically loose collections of independent kingdoms save that one king happened to have the rest of the kings’ families held hostage--giving them power over the legitimate propagation of their vassals’ lines.

When people from the various islands and peninsulas that will never be collectively known as Europe came to dominate the world, there were some of these trading/legitimacy empires among those they created, and generally speaking it was far easier to tell the difference between, say, someone from not-Amsterdam and someone from the mouth of the river that would never be known as the Congo than it is to tell the difference between eastern and western not-Mediterranean peoples. And of course those clans who had dealings with the invaders would be more likely to interbreed with the invaders, with obvious consequences for the appearance of future generations, and so they came to value lighter-skinned natives over darker-skinned ones.

But these were one type of empire among many, and the others were having gene flow up and down the social hierarchy--and between the colonies and the motherland. There were many ways for such systems to break before being set in stone, such as by shifts in allegiances among the colonized peoples or the adoption of a different imperial strategy. And eventually it was too late; the world had become far too mixed.

Clans persist throughout history. The nuclear family simply cannot exist. Communities cannot atomize the way they have in our West and there’s no culture anywhere that puts  _ too _ great an emphasis on personal independence--itself having consequences both positive and negative.

All this is to say: life goes on. History goes on. This world has its tragedies and triumphs, its struggles and revolutions, politics, religions, arts, cultures, and so on and so forth. Children still laugh and birds still sing, etcetera.

And then there is the  _ intended  _ effect of the magic that’s at work on these people. It’s far more explicitly supernatural, and yet manifests so extremely rarely that most people have never heard of it, there isn’t a proper name for it, and most of the people who have heard of it don’t believe it exists--and even those who do think the reports are exaggerated in some way. A strange mental affliction in which two people are suddenly and simultaneously rendered obsessed with one another. Even on those rare occasions where it does happen it can often go unnoticed--if the two are able to immediately converse after eyes meet across the room or whatever happened, they will find that their personalities are quite compatible and be able to trick themselves in their memories into thinking that that’s why they became such fast friends (and that is what they think of themselves as--after all, there is no word or concept in their world for what they really are).

Among those who have heard of this condition, there is a plausible theory that it only seems instant and simultaneous in retrospect due to faulty memory, and does rely on a cycle of reinforcement, and that if a person becomes obsessed with a person who does not reinforce this cycle, they will forget it ever happened--thus explaining away the spooky and supernatural elements of the condition. Other ideas mainly rely on pheromones and such. These explanations are all wrong, of course; the reason it seems supernatural is because it is--but it’s unlikely to ever be proven, given how rare these cases are. And it’s only going to grow rarer, proportionally speaking.

It was a rare thing to happen at the dawn of the Holocene, when the human population was in the single-digit millions--so how likely is it that, among the teeming billions of people living in the world today, you will ever find your one and only soul mate?


End file.
